by Carol Birch
Tea spilled on the cloth.
‘Oh, Ishbel!’ her mother chided.
‘It’s only a saucer,’ she said.
I leaned forward to help with the mopping up but she slapped the back of my hand. She was shaking with tears, they came in a feverish rush. ‘Shame you never even found the dragon,’ she said, the words catching in her throat.
Damn that thing. Damn it to hell for calling up demons. Our superstition.
‘Let me help,’ I said, reaching out once more towards the mess on the table.
‘Oh, leave it!’ Ishbel tossed herself back into her chair.
‘There you are, love, don’t cry like that,’ her mother said, but the saying of it set her off too, and I couldn’t stand it any more. I stood up.
‘I have to go,’ I said desperately.
‘Yes,’ said Ishbel, ‘this is very hard.’
Eyes tight closed, Mrs Linver sucked her knuckles, clicked her throat.
‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Linver,’ I said again lamely, but she waved me away.
Ishbel stood. ‘I’ll see you out.’
In the dark hall she threw her arms round me and squeezed me and kissed my mouth hard. ‘It’s so good to see you again, Jaffy!’ She was laughing and crying at the same time. I couldn’t see her face. I grabbed her again and pulled her close.
‘God, Ishbel,’ I mumbled. Her soft warm breast pressed against me.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘it must have been hell.’
‘God.’ I wouldn’t let her go. She was all things good I’d longed towards when I was in the boat. I could have crushed her.
‘Poor, poor Jaffy,’ she crooned, swaying about with me and stroking the back of my head. It lasted a few long seconds, till we drew clumsily apart and bumped giddily towards the door as if drunk.
‘Come and have a proper talk with me, won’t you?’ she said as she opened the door for me. ‘I’m back at work tomorrow and I won’t get a chance to breathe before Friday week at least. Will you go in the Malt Shovel on Saturday?’
‘I couldn’t say.’
‘Well, I’ll see you soon,’ she said, smiled and gave me one last kiss, tears still running from her eyes, and there I was out in the early evening, reeling, down towards the Highway where the sailors and colliers were beginning to whoop it up. I went into a tavern and got very drunk with a sailor from Naples, who swore and scratched his bug bites savagely for the entire duration of my stay, making his arms bleed. Filthy lodgings, he said, spitting. Filthy food and filthy girls.
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘Filthy, all filthy,’ and spent some more money. I could never go back.
‘I killed my friend,’ I said to the Italian.
He waved an arm forgivingly as if to say, don’t we all? I opened my mouth to tell more but was dumb. Never go back. She was engaged. No point at all. Just rub salt in the wounds whenever she saw me.
The touts and whores had noted my carelessness and circled round, but I was wise to all that. Around midnight I went home in a cab, and to bed, with spinning head and dry mouth, heart as sick and bloated as a tick.
They tell me I was afloat for sixty-five days.
You don’t easily get back from a thing like that. Dark in the night I’d lie awake and know I’d never really returned, that I was lost still and always would be. I floated in a stream of babbling time. I went to ground. Never went to see Ishbel. She sent a letter, but I ignored it. Said sorry she’d missed me at the Malt Shovel, she hoped I was well. Well, she was a kind-hearted girl, she would say that. I went back to bed and wouldn’t get up. I stayed upstairs at Ma’s. Slept and slept, sat and sat, drank and drank, scribbled my testament and tore it up, again and again. The sounds outside my window soothed me. My bruise ached, a permanent bruise on my upper right arm, from Tim’s grip on the boat. I should have shown her that. I should have shown Ishbel. Now and then I looked out over the wintry rooftops. Dream and life and thoughts, darks and lights, coalescing, my head no more than a bubble about to burst. My mind walked on cloud tops, soared in trances of killing delight. My head was a chasm. The universe pressed down on me.
Ma kept coming in and nagging. I kept sending her away. One day she said she’d bumped into Mrs Linver, and Mrs Linver had said she hoped I was well and that Ishbel sent her love. How could she know that? It was just something people said to be nice. Anyway, I didn’t even have Ishbel’s address, so it was up to her to come round here if she wanted to see me. But she didn’t bother, and I didn’t bother and anyway I was too tired to do anything or even think about anything. Here in this world, all that I’d gone through counted for nothing. No one could know me now. Only Dan, and he’d gone back to his family. We had a dragon between us, never to be mentioned. Still now it seemed as if the thing’s unleashing caused it all. What was the point of explaining? Pointless. How was I supposed to go back to work as if nothing had happened?
David kept coming in and messing about with my things. Would you believe I had souvenirs of my grief? A piece of twine, a scrap of sailcloth, a few knuckle bones. One was from Tim, the others could have been anyone’s. It didn’t matter. The rest they took from us when we were taken on-board.
‘Piss off out of here, you,’ I told him.
‘David, leave him alone.’ My mother’s voice.
Voices downstairs. The normal sounds of life.
A stone crushed my chest. I did not leave my room unless it was very quiet. Ma brought my food up and I picked at it, stuff I’d cried for in the boat. It upset my stomach. She kept on at me to come down, came and sat on my bed and stroked my hair and said everyone was enquiring after me and sending good wishes. ‘I’ve done you a lovely chucky-egg,’ she said.
‘I’m not a baby,’ I replied, floating back into the stream of time, day and night, dark and light, sound and silence, my room and the boat lapping along together, nothing between them. I lay in it like a hedgehog in the winter, huddled warm, the world above persisting beyond my care, like the heavens above the sky or the world of air above the undersea. I saw the wisdom of cats and old dogs that sleep time away. Whenever I came up it was to sink back again. I was in this state even when up and walking about, as I did to please Ma every now and then, appearing bashfully, sitting at the table to play with my food, bringing the coal in, minding David. That was easy. He was a placid child and he found me fascinating. That is, he took great satisfaction in studying my face with close attention, a thoughtful frown on his brow. When he wasn’t doing that he was talking happily to his train, a long red wooden thing called Dob, knocked up by Charley Grant. A few words were coming through, not just Ma and Pa: he was coming out with ‘trousers’ and ‘cot’ and ‘doggy’, and ‘baby’ and ‘drink’ and ‘raining’. And ‘no’, which he said a lot. The rest was babble. I could gain a lot of points with Ma by minding David, and I could do it pretty much in my hedgehog state, so that became my occupation for a lot of the time as I drifted, protected by the soft blanket of slothdom, thoughtless, maddeningly boring, tepid. Panic stirring like a whale in the deeps below.
One night I went out. I went to old Spoony’s and was greeted as a returning son. Bob Barry sat at my table and bought all the drinks, old faces smiled into mine, new ones picked up the story and turned my way. I was quite the toast. God knows how I got home, I drank a skinful. They had a big dirty pot man and a new little pot boy, about nine years old, couldn’t get enough of me. I remember him in all the bright head-spin of that place, me sitting at my solitary centre, his eager snubby nub of a face looming into mine, grinning wildly. ‘Hello, mister!’
‘Hello,’ I replied.
‘You want me to fetch you a pipe?’
I considered. A pipe. That would be nice.
He ran away delighted, returning with a well-packed meerschaum carved in the likeness of a lush naked woman, which he put solicitously to my lips and carefully lit. It drew beautifully and filled my lungs with warmth.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Mister.’ He stood back. ‘What was it
like?’
I took my time, leaning back and blowing out a thin stream of smoke.
‘What?’ I asked. ‘Which bit of it?’
‘I don’t know. Everything.’
‘Everything?’ I laughed.
Much later he got round to telling me that what he really wanted to know was what it tasted like. Was it like pork? He’d heard it was like pork.
‘A bit,’ I said. ‘Not quite.’
‘How not like?’
‘I dunno.’
‘Was it nice?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Won’t you tell me?’
‘No.’
He wanted a story. A thing of horror. I have a story, a terrible one. But I’ll tell no tales. He doesn’t understand at all: it’s not that kind of a story, not horror but grief I have to deal with. Too much to tell. What shall I do with it?
Live with it.
So I rolled home and went back to bed, and if anyone came round I hid upstairs. They let me. There’s freedom in madness, I didn’t need to justify anything. The world owed me a little peace. I put my head back down under and let the sweet fishes nibble my nose. Oh, sweet sleep, sweet, sweet, sweet …
For about eight months I went on like this. Somewhere in the middle of it all Dan came to see me. I was lying on my bed dozing, and he walked in and kicked my foot. ‘Shake a leg, Jaf,’ he said.
I got up on one elbow.
‘Stinks in here,’ he said. ‘Look what I brought you.’
A bit of scrimshaw, the likeness of a parrot carved on it.
‘It’s walrus,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d like it.’
‘Nice.’ I turned it over and over in my hand.
‘How are you, lad? Your ma says you’re not up to much these days.’
‘True. Still tired, I suppose.’ I was yawning as I spoke, and he laughed. There wasn’t a chair, so he sat himself down on the floor under the window, his coat hunched up about the back of his head. He fished out a pouch of sweet tobacco, and we sat and smoked as the darkness in the corners of the room turned blue. Little and old and twisted he looked sometimes, but the way he sat and smoked still carried a curious quality of youth in it, and his hair was still vigorous. Had a nasty cough though.
I asked him: ‘How is it? Life ashore?’
And he smiled and said, ‘Precious.’
Half an hour did we sit? I don’t think it was longer. We didn’t talk much. He said from now on he would devote his life to watching his children growing up, and to the study of natural history, and he asked me what I would do. I didn’t know.
‘I’d say we have a duty, we two.’ His face was indistinct, but I could see the smoke spuming out of his nostrils.
‘Don’t give me that,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘I know what it’s like. But I’m older than you. It makes a difference.’
‘Wisdom? Huh!’ I said. ‘When I look around me, Dan, I don’t see a lot of old wise people.’
He laughed again. ‘Who’s claiming wisdom? I’m only saying being old makes a difference. We came through, we have a duty to make the most of it.’
I was sick of people telling me how lucky I was. I didn’t feel lucky. If there was a God, I thought, he must be a twisted sort. All of them gone and all that pain and fear, and not a one of them deserved it.
‘Listen,’ I said, ‘there’s no meaning in it. Just chance. Random, pointless. There’s no other way of seeing it.’ My anger grew. ‘I might not have gone. I nearly didn’t. Some other boy would have got my place. Remember George? Jumped ship at the Cape? Chance! He’s alive and they’re dead. That’s all it is. Blind chance.’
It was the longest speech I’d made since my return.
Dan’s head was now completely obscured by smoke. ‘You’re right,’ he said.
We sat in silence for a while. The room grew darker and the smell of stew rose up from beneath.
‘So, what are we to do?’ He was invisible. ‘Shall we die?’ A spasm of coughing. ‘Or shall we live?’
A longer silence.
‘A hand is dealt,’ he said. ‘You take it.’
I felt I ought to speak: ‘And that is my duty?’
‘It is.’
I was tired, so I lay down and closed my eyes.
‘I’ll be going,’ he said.
I didn’t open my eyes. He groaned as he pushed himself up from the floor. ‘These old bones.’ He heaved a sigh.
He stood for a moment as if waiting for me to say something, but I didn’t. Then he said: ‘I know what it’s like. I have it too. The melancholics.’
I still didn’t speak.
‘You should come to dinner at our house, Jaf,’ he said, ‘when you’re feeling up to it.’
‘Thanks. I will,’ I said.
But I couldn’t see it happening soon.
*
It was one morning, the sound of a concertina playing ‘Santy Anno’. Over the rooftops. Towards the river, towards the Highway. Winter and spring had gone, and the summer was full-blown. I went for a walk, following the sound, but I never found it or it took another direction, I don’t know. I just wandered about, stopping now and then to loll about and watch the river. I could still hear ‘Santy Anno’ in my head, and it came to me that I must get myself a concertina and learn to play it. It came as something more than an idle thought, more like a kick, so that I almost jumped up there and then and ran for home to get some money and off to Rosemary Lane to pick up an old concertina. But it was so nice by the river watching a big clipper sailing in like a swan that I didn’t move. I could see the sailors moving about their business on the decks and in the rigging, and it seemed to me I could feel the deck beneath my feet, real as ever. There flashed across my eyes then, bright and startling, first a bleeding sunset more beautiful than a heart could bear; then an explosion of pink heart muscle throbbing in a bucket as the boat lurched high; and last: Tim, just as he always was, my daft friend. He was horrible to me sometimes, but I think he loved me. I was dreamy. I drifted home. I don’t know where the day went. The lateness of our yard surprised me. Ma’s shells were tidy on the windowsill, and David stood full in the window, smiling snot-faced at me. It was a lovely smile. It brought back that great wave of love I’d felt out there in the boat when I thought I’d never get back. Filled me right up. Terrified me. Oh, my London. All wasting. I am still here. I went in and straight upstairs and got into bed with all my clothes on and pulled the covers over my head and lay down in the dark. My heart was beating loud and scared in my ear that lay against the pillow. Long as I live I’ll never be wise. Never understand why it happened as it happened, never understand where they’ve gone, all those faces I see clear in the darkness. There’s no way out of this, it’s stark: live or die. Every given moment a bubble that bursts. Step on, from one to the next, ever onwards, a rainbow of stepping stones, each bursting softly as your foot touches and passes on. Till one step finds only empty air. Till that step, live.
There was a movement in my room, a little mouse creeping. I opened my eyes and stuck my head up from under the covers. It was Ma with a candle, half in and half out the door. ‘You coming down for a bite, Jaf?’ she said.
I was going to say no, but said, ‘Is it ready?’
‘Just about.’
She put the candle down and went away, leaving the door open. I sat up and put my feet down on the floor and yawned till tears forced out from my eyes. I was cold. I went down to the fire and the food.
‘Lovely bit of herring, that is,’ Charley Grant said as I sat down. ‘Here.’ He pushed the bread board towards me.
The herring was crusted with oats, fried brown.
‘We were thinking,’ Ma said, ‘you ought to start going out with Charl on the market some of these mornings. If you’re not doing anything else you might as well learn the ropes here.’
‘Fine,’ I said, but oh my God, that night lying awake in bed, thinking: got to do something or I’ll end up living with Ma and Charley
for the rest of my life and die on the fish stall. What’s the choice? Fish. Pot boy. I’d be quite a draw. The cannibal pot boy. Work at Jamrach’s again. Go back to sea.
Back to sea, I suppose.
Next day I went to see Dan Rymer. He must have done well over the years, one way or another. He had a big house in a fine terrace in a nice part of Bow, with a black railing at the front and steps going down into an area, where a fat black and white cat sat meditating. The door was opened by a girl of about fourteen, aproned and bedraggled. ‘You’re Jaffy Brown,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
‘I’d know you anywhere,’ she said, ‘never stops talking about you, he don’t. Curly hair, dark skin.’Course it’s you.’
‘Never stops talking about me?’
‘Oh no! Best man he ever sailed with! Here, you’d better come in.’
I stepped into a hall with walls covered in hangings and clocks and masks from all over the world, and an open door with kids running in and out.
‘In there,’ she said, so I went in. There were tiny tables and big stuffed chairs, a wall full of books, roses all over the carpet and a large solemn dog not deigning to get up out of its comfortable sprawl in front of the fire. In the window, two caged lovebirds sat breast to breast, eyeing the room. There were children, noisy, I can’t remember how many or who, but they took no notice of me at all till Dan appeared, clasping me to him like a long-lost son, and then they crowded round, curious, and even the dog got up. It was funny seeing Dan at home. Quite the seaman’s beard he was growing for himself these days.
‘Alice!’ he shouted. ‘Jaffy’s come!’ and she came, that tall woman from a far-ago morning at the Greenland Dock (the smell of the morning air, tar, sweat, ale, me and Tim standing together and Ishbel waving, red shoes, black shawl), and stooped, smiling, to kiss my cheek.
‘At last,’ she said warmly. ‘Thank you for bringing him home, Jaffy.’
‘Other way round, ma’am,’ I muttered. ‘It was him brought me home.’
She had wide, thin lips, hard angles in her face, lines growing in the corners of her eyes. Very friendly, she was. Her dark brown eyes were steady and intelligent. ‘Say what you like,’ she said, ‘you brought him home.’